My NEW Taki piece — Roseanne Barr: The gift that keeps on getting returned

In showbiz, if you simply manage not to die, sooner or later you’ll enjoy a career revival. Sure (to borrow from Sondheim), by “then you’re camp,” but does Neil Diamond care that half his post-Saving Silverman concertgoers are just being “ironic”?

Roseanne’s smash eponymous sitcom went off the air in 1997 after a nine-year run. That means she’s had fifteen years to mellow into “camp” and “ironic”—practically a generation, which is a pretty fair fermentation period.

But for whatever reason, in her case that usually reliable pop-culture formula has flopped.